


i will learn to love the shears

by corpsesoldier



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: F/F, Fluff, Haircuts, Introspection, Mutual Pining, a little angst because it's harrow
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:00:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,708
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28438020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/corpsesoldier/pseuds/corpsesoldier
Summary: The avulsion trial left Harrow's hair in a sorry state and Gideon offers up her expertise with a blade. Or, Gideon gives Harrow a haircut.
Relationships: Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Comments: 19
Kudos: 152





	i will learn to love the shears

**Author's Note:**

> almost 5k of a HAIRCUT!! my brain is officially broken. please enjoy the results.
> 
> title from “the gardener” by sarah sparks, courtesy of my griddlehark playlist. yes it is a pun, and yes the song makes me terribly sad.

Harrow’s hair was an embarrassment. 

She plucked at it in the murky bathroom mirror. By the time she had her ward in place the field in the avulsion challenge had chewed her hair down to a scraggy, uneven mess—some of it almost untouched, other parts short enough to stick up in intolerably fluffy clumps. It had also peeled the paint from her face and ground her robes to powder, but that was of little consequence. She had plenty of paint and could keep up appearances with her second-best robes, which were forbiddingly and majestically Ninth enough to stave off both questions and pity. Maybe not in the eyes of Duchess Septimus—who had seen her stripped naked and had laid hands on her screaming cavalier—but for the rest. (She did not much care for Septimus’s assessment of her now; she had much worse on the woman than just the sight of her bare flesh.) 

However, she manifestly could _not_ keep up appearances as Reverend Daughter of the House of the Ninth while looking like Aunt Aisamorta had held her down while Aunt Lachrimorta took shears to her head. 

Thankfully, one of the skeleton servitors brought her a pair of scissors and a razor when she’d asked, and both seemed sharp enough to do the job, if a little rusty. She took a length of hair between her fingers, grimacing at herself, her face strange without her sacramental skull. The tickling sensation of her paint crumbling to dust still lingered against her skin. The barrier hadn’t been right, at first. The insectile buzzing of the field as it tried to eat through her ward, its hunger almost like heat on her skin, and she had been able to feel Gideon, had _heard_ Gideon— It had been difficult to concentrate. But she was not the greatest necromancer her house had ever produced for nothing. She had gotten it eventually. Obviously, because she was still alive. 

The scissors shook in her hand.

She snarled at her reflection and nearly started her assault, shaking hands or not, when the door to their quarters banged open. Harrow didn’t even flinch. No assassin would be so careless. There was only one person who would be that pointlessly loud.

“Hey, Harrow!” Gideon called from the main room. “Did you eat? I brought some—”

Harrow had a split second to regret her decision to leave the bathroom door ajar before Gideon Nav stepped into view. She took up almost the entire doorframe, done up in her sorry excuse for face paint and her ridiculous glasses, and she froze as she beheld Harrow hunched over the basin, holding a pair of scissors like a murder weapon. Her jaw dropped a little and the skull went somehow whiter as the skin beneath it paled. Gideon looked like she’d walked in on Harrowhark naked. Or what Harrow imagined she would have looked like in that situation, had Gideon not be somewhat indisposed. Harrow nearly recoiled, nearly shouted for Gideon to leave her alone, when she remembered she wasn’t wearing her paint.

She felt heat crawl up past her sternum, cresting like a wave over her clavicle, and she turned away to prevent any further embarrassment. Except, _fuck_ , she could still see Gideon in the mirror. 

“I’m busy,” she snapped. She looked at her own face instead of her cavalier’s and prayed to the Tomb for the pink to go out of her cheeks.

“Oh,” Gideon said, stupidly. And then, recovering, “Yeah. Probably a good idea. You look like one of the field skeletons dropped you headfirst into the mulcher.”

“And you look like someone tried to scour your head with bleach.”

“Ouch.” Gideon, of all things, smiled. “That only happened once and it’s because _you_ smeared some weird tomb slime in my hair.”

“You pushed me down the stairs first.”

“It was like four stairs, max. You were fine. Do you want help?”

Harrow almost dropped the scissors. “Excuse me?”

Gideon took a few steps into the bathroom. She held one of her hands out a little awkwardly, like she’d been reaching for something and forgotten what it was. Harrow couldn’t tell where she was looking through the dark lenses. “Do you want help?” she asked again, just as nonsensically. “With you hair. I mean, it’s kind of hard to do yourself, right? And I could—help.” She looked like she regretted opening her mouth.

The silence pulled taut, a tendon at the breaking point, quickly unraveling. Harrow grasped her pride by the blade and cut the fraying edge. “I can handle myself,” she said.

Gideon seemed to shrink, her broad shoulders collapsing in on themselves. She looked like Harrow had personally thrown her longsword off one of the terrace balconies. She was always so easy to read, so easy to hurt. It made Harrow feel dried out and sick.

“But,” she amended in a rush, “if you want to—that is, if you’re offering—” Harrow closed her mouth so quickly her teeth clicked. Gideon had offered her too much, of late. “I would appreciate the help,” she muttered. 

Gideon hesitated, half turned away, like she might still flee from Harrow like from something foul that had bubbled up out of the drain. Then she rubbed at the back of her neck, and Harrow realized that her cavalier was nervous. She didn’t know what to do with that information, so she dropped it into a mental drawer and welded it shut.

“You’re sure?” Gideon asked.

Harrow rolled her eyes. “Are you going to make yourself useful or not?”

A smile broke across Gideon’s face again and Harrow relaxed slightly. “Hey, what are cavaliers for?”

Gideon plucked the scissors from Harrow’s hand by the blades and spun them casually around her fingers. She removed her sunglasses to get a better look at what she had to work with. Harrow instantly wished that she would put them back on. Her eyes had always seemed too strange, too bright in a House characterized by shadow and rot.

Gideon _snicked_ the scissors a few times, experimentally, golden eyes roving over the mess in front of her. Harrow drew her shoulders up, bracing to be touched. She was determined not to flinch. But the seconds stretched and no touch came. She peered at Gideon through the fall of her bangs. Gideon was staring at the back of her head like a necromantic tome she couldn’t hope to parse. She looked lost, somehow, and it made Harrow uneasy. Harrow cleared her throat and Gideon locked eyes with her in the mirror, jumping like she’d forgotten Harrow was there.

“What’s wrong?” Harrow demanded, sharper than she intended.

“Nothing,” Gideon said, too quickly. “Uh. Stick your head under the tap.”

“What?” Harrow sputtered. “Why?”

“Easier to cut when it’s wet.”

“I have managed perfectly well before—”

“Hey, you said you wanted my help. Don’t make me hold you down.”

“Try it,” Harrow said, with as much chill as she could manage, “and I’ll shrink the bones in your legs until you have to look up at Octakiseron.”

“Oh God, anything but that,” Gideon said in mock distress. “I couldn’t handle being a shrimp. Look what it did to you.” 

Gideon reached past her—her cavalier’s chest pressed briefly against Harrow’s back—and turned on the sink. Harrow’s retort was declared legally dead before it could make the journey from her brain to her mouth. 

“C’mon,” Gideon prodded. “Not exactly how I wanted to get a girl all wet for me but it’ll have to do.”

“Nav, you are a _pervert,_ ” Harrow said. She stuck her head under the running water in the vague hope that she might drown. When she surfaced—spluttering, water soaking the neck of her robe—Gideon’s expression was one Harrow thought she reserved for finding new pornography at the bottom of the Ninth mail delivery.

“What?” Harrow snarled.

“Nothing,” Gideon said with evident delight. “I just didn’t actually think you’d do it.”

Harrow chewed the inside of her cheek. She should send Gideon away. Should order it, as befitted her station as Reverend Daughter. She did not need to stand for further humiliation. But there was a light quality to her voice that gave Harrow pause. Gideon quirked an eyebrow at her in the mirror. Vicious understanding stung Harrow. Gideon was _teasing_ her.

“Just get on with it.” She rolled her eyes again, entirely for her cavalier’s benefit.

“As you wish, my sepulchral sorceress.” 

Gideon’s smile was triumphant. But her bravado fractured a little when presented with the reality of a soaking wet Harrow and her mangy mop of hair. Like she hadn’t thought she would actually get this far. When Gideon reached for her, her hands were fumbling and awkward. She took one of the dripping locks between thumb and forefinger like she was extracting a stray bone chip from a bowl of gruel and just held it there, staring, like she had no idea what she was supposed to do with it. When she finally remembered the scissors, she trimmed a few ends with agonizing slowness, like she expected each strand of hair to cry out between the blades. Even Nav’s first clumsy bout with her rapier, which Aiglamene had indicated was just shy of disaster, had employed more grace than this. 

Gideon was taking great pains, Harrow realized, not to touch her. 

She sucked in a breath through her nose. “King Undying, Nav, no one is making you do this.”

Gideon flinched away from her like Harrow had laid a whip across her hands. Harrow bit her tongue savagely. She never learned how to blunt her sharp edges and it was always Gideon who ended up speared straight through. Her cavalier’s golden eyes were wide and startled, watching her like she was an advancing predator. Harrowhark’s spine was a fused pillar of bone beneath her skin, but she straightened her back, tilted her chin up, and gathered what remained of her dignity like the interlocking pieces of an exoskeleton.

“Give me the scissors. I’ll do it myself,” she said. She snatched at them, but Gideon held them out of her reach and Harrow would not be goaded into jumping for them like a toddler. “Nav, you clearly don’t want—”

“I do,” Gideon said firmly. “I do want to.”

Harrow subsided, caught off guard by the resolve in Gideon’s voice. She sounded almost frustrated. Like she was trying to convince Harrow, or convince herself, but thought she shouldn’t need to. It shouldn’t have soothed Harrow’s pride, except that she knew what Gideon sounded like when she was lying. She wasn’t lying to her now. Harrow forced herself to be still.

Her cavalier must have read the question in her face. She cleared her throat. “You, uh—your hair is really soft.”

Okay. Well. That was not what she expected her to say.

“Just surprised me,” she went on. “I mean, not like you get the proper nutrition to maintain your sleek and glossy coat. I’m not 100% convinced you eat when I’m not watching.” She was very decidedly not meeting Harrow’s eyes. But she gently combed some hair up between her fingers and took the scissors to Harrow’s ragged ends.

It was like flipping a switch. Gideon circled around Harrow’s back like a duelist probing for weakness, ducking in under her guard to remove an offending cowlick or hack an overgrown section back into uniformity. Sometimes she stopped suddenly and Harrow stiffened with nascent dread, but she was only ever thinking about her next move, opening and closing the scissors idly, before diving back in. She didn’t cut with any artistry, but that didn’t matter. Gideon fell into a rhythm as naturally as breathing—choose a section of hair, measure with her fingers, cut, repeat. It was like Harrow wasn’t there. Or, no, not exactly. It was like Gideon didn’t mind that she was there.

Little drifts of black hair started to pile up on Harrow’s shoulders. Gideon thoughtlessly brushed them onto the floor. A drop of water crawled down the back of Harrow’s neck and she shuddered.

“Stop squirming,” Gideon said. “Unless you want me to snip off one of your ears.”

“Wouldn’t you be ashamed to walk around with a lopsided necromancer?”

Gideon hummed, considering. “I could always ask Coronabeth to stick it back on for you.”

“The day the Third House deigns to do us a service is the day you die.” Harrow frowned at Gideon’s casual use of the Crown Princess’s name. She had allowed her cavalier to get too friendly with too many unknown quantities. It was dangerous to ally themselves with any of the other houses. There was too much at stake. And look where it had gotten them with the Seventh.

Gideon _had_ nearly died; Sextus told her as much. Gideon had looked it, curled into herself on the cold floor, blood all down her front, head cradled in another necromancer’s lap. When Harrow had turned back and beheld that tableau, it was as though the field had chewed through her barrier and her skin beneath it, leaving her raw and cold and exposed. It had taken Harrow three seconds before she remembered how to run.

Gideon had _allowed_ it. Had almost thrown her life into the sucking black pit of Harrowhark Nonagesimus’s soul, already full to the brim with other people’s sacrifices. And for what? A key they no longer had and a wretched theorem that stunk of the Eighth House, one Harrow hoped she would never have cause to use again.

And here Gideon was, cutting her hair. 

“All right,” Gideon said after some time, pulling Harrow out of the mire of her thoughts. “What do you think?”

Her hair was cropped very close now. It wasn’t a professional cut by any means, but Harrow had been hacking at her own hair long enough to see that it was as good as it was going to get. She ran her fingers over the bristly hair behind her ears, feeling the warmth of her skin beneath. It was certainly better than what she would have accomplished on her own. Gideon had been careful to blend the lines where the field had taken the most until everything was neat and smooth. Harrow turned her head to the side, like she was trying to read some dark secret in the grain of the hair follicles.

Gideon forged on through Harrow’s silence like she could trample it to death. “It was all super uneven. Like, almost-bald-in-spots uneven. I did what I could. You really let that Lyctor test take a chunk out of you, O greatest necromancer of your generation.”

Harrow brushed her fingers over the back of her neck, sending puffs of hair spiraling to the floor and an unfortunate amount down the back of her robe, where it immediately started to itch. Gideon’s eyes followed the movement, still with that intent duelist’s focus, and Harrow dropped her hand to her side, feeling small and self-conscious. “If you recall, Griddle,” she snapped, “I was somewhat distracted at the time.” 

Distracted was one word for how she had felt in that chamber, when she had heard Gideon cry out in agony. Harrow did not want to know what her cavalier sounded like when she really screamed. 

She had devoted her childhood to causing Gideon pain. She had hunted Nav for sport, like she took no greater joy than in personally crushing any comfort or pleasure Gideon might have scraped together out of the dust of Drearburh. Harrow had made Gideon shout and snarl and even weep and every reaction made a frenzied triumph burn through her like fever. But Gideon always met her blow for blow. She had thought Gideon would face impending death with a naked blade and a bad attitude, the same way she had always faced down Harrow. Instead, Harrow had seen Gideon teeter on that edge with the calm acceptance of a saint and that had scared her more than anything shy of rolling away the rock before the Tomb.

Maybe once she might have wanted to hear Gideon scream. Or she might have thought she wanted it. But that empty animal howl, torn from a Gideon who hadn’t even tried to fight back? Harrow didn’t want to know that. Harrow wished she could forget.

Gideon dropped her gaze. Harrow blinked, startled. She had not been looking at her cavalier’s handiwork in the mirror, but at Gideon herself. 

“Right,” Gideon said. The scissors, task completed, hung awkwardly from her hand. That quiet confidence had gone out of her, leaving her face a flat mask beneath the paint. Her expression was one of carefully schooled indifference. Harrow knew it was carefully schooled only because Gideon was never indifferent about anything, ever, and made it known at every opportunity. But right now Harrow couldn’t see anything past the white grinning skull and she felt a twist of fear in her gut.

Gideon slid the scissors onto the granite countertop and reached for her sunglasses. Her movements were precise. Businesslike. Job done. Time to pack up.

That should haven been fine. Ideal, even. Harrow was presentable again. Neither of them had suffered grievous bodily harm. She had not made Gideon do anything she hadn’t wanted to do. The conversation had been almost friendly. It had been—nice. But she’d still misstepped somehow, as she always seemed to. 

Gideon was sliding her glasses onto her nose. Gideon was turning away from her.

Harrow’s eyes fell on the razor resting beside the basin.

“Wait,” she said.

Gideon hesitated, her head half-cocked back in Harrow’s direction. Her eyebrows crept above the frame of her glasses, but with the dark glass hiding her eyes Harrow couldn’t tell if it was in askance or surprise or indignation.

Harrow rubbed fretfully at the hair on the back of her neck, as though she could scour it away with enough force. She grabbed up the razor and proffered it into the space between them. 

“I want it all off.” And then, hating herself, “Please?”

All the sharp lines of Gideon’s body softened. She pushed the glasses partway down her nose and Harrow found herself pinned beneath that yellow gaze again. She didn’t fight it. Gideon could leave her there and she would deserve it. Gideon could laugh in her face and she would deserve it. Gideon could cut her throat and she would deserve that, too.

Instead, Gideon smiled crookedly at her and Harrow felt it like a blow to the diaphragm. “What are you doing penance for?” Gideon asked.

Harrow snorted. What wasn’t she doing penance for? Her existence carved a wound into the world. She had nearly bled dry the last daughter of her house in the name of her ambition. And here she was, tugging Gideon’s chains again for her own selfishness.

“It’s neater,” is all Harrow said.

Gideon watched her for a moment longer and then shrugged. “All right. It’s your weird lumpy skull, not mine.” 

She stepped up behind Harrow again, no more than half a step away, and took the folded razor from Harrow’s hand. The callouses on her palm brushed against the backs of Harrow’s knuckles and Harrow dropped her hand like she’d been burned. Her face certainly felt hot enough to blister. She was never taking her paint off again.

Gideon pushed her glasses onto the top of her head with one hand and flicked open the razor with the other. She paused, looking from the blade to Harrow’s skinny, unprotected neck and back again. She pressed the pad of her thumb gently to the edge of the razor and grunted softly, in thought.

“You’re sure about this?” she asked.

Harrow imagined the cool touch of metal on her skin. Imagined how sharp it would be and the strength of Gideon’s hands and all the ways she had made Gideon’s life hell for years and years and years. She met Gideon’s eyes evenly.

“Griddle, if I didn’t think you could handle a blade I wouldn’t have brought you here in the first place. You sleep with your rapier. I think your mother was part sword. I imagine you’re perfectly capable.”

Gideon’s smile was something softer and looser than the smirk Harrow expected. “Got that right, baby. ‘Perfectly capable’ is my middle name.”

“No, it isn’t. I checked your paperwork and it’s actually ‘insufferable moron’—”

The words died in Harrow’s throat as Gideon pressed one hand, fingers splayed, to the back of her parietal bone and dragged a line up to the crown of her skull. Deliberate and thoughtful, like an artist assessing the quality of her canvas. Her fingertips brushed the line of Harrow’s coronal suture and the noise that emerged from Harrow’s mouth made her want to kill them both where they stood and leave their corpses as another puzzle box for Sextus to frown over. The ensuing silence rang in Harrow’s ears like the slow collapse of a terrace into the waiting sea. She was extremely aware of Gideon’s nearness, of the rise and fall of her breathing, of the hand that was _still in her hair._

Gideon, with the mercy of the Emperor himself, said nothing. Nothing except, “Water.” 

Harrow had never been so grateful to duck her head into the cold stream of the faucet. Anything to escape the way Gideon suddenly looked, for some reason, very sad. 

She came back up dripping and shivering and Gideon’s expression had settled back into a smirk, faintly mocking and familiar. Harrow’s shoulders dropped in surrender. She didn’t even flinch when Gideon tilted her head forward with a soft touch to her skull. The razor was as cool and sharp as she had imagined, but Gideon was careful and it did not cut her. She had no contingencies for Gideon Nav’s grace, for her gentleness. She could only take what Gideon gave her. 

_Probably because you asked,_ Gideon had said. That admission was more dangerous in Harrow’s hands than a fistful of knucklebones. Gideon had cut her hair because she’d asked. Gideon had stayed because she’d asked. Gideon had almost died on the floor of the avulsion chamber because she’d asked.

For all that Harrow had demanded obedience, she found the reality did not agree with her. She did not want Gideon’s surrender. She certainly did not want Gideon to die for her. If she could not convince Gideon to price her life more highly, if Gideon was going to metaphorically open her veins for little more than a _please_ , she was going to need to be much more circumspect with her requests. Harrow realized with a start that she would, in fact, need to be trustworthy. 

She could not imagine what she had done to earn Gideon Nav’s trust.

“Hey,” Gideon said, pausing in her work. Harrow’s shoulders had tensed under the warm expanse of her palm. “It’s gonna be all right, y’know?”

Harrow stared at her blankly and Gideon’s cheeks darkened in a flush. She dropped her eyes back to the careful scrape of the razor against Harrow’s skin. But she continued, “I mean, I know everything’s totally fucked up right now. With Protesilaus missing and Dulcinea sick and—and Magnus—” She swallowed. “But we’ll find him. And you’ll figure this out, you and Palamades. And I—”

Her grip on Harrow’s shoulder tightened minutely.

“I won’t let anyone else die.”

Harrow almost told her everything. She could feel the words burning in her chest like a nova of thanergy aching for release, aching to be given structure and made real. The secrets crowded her throat. Harrowhark Nonagesimus was a necromantic transgression made flesh. Harrowhark had nearly sacrificed the universe on the altar of her own pain. At this very moment, Harrowhark had a man’s severed head hidden in the bottom of her wardrobe. It would be so easy to open her mouth and retch up all her patchwork sins and condemn herself to Gideon’s judgement.

She said nothing. Because she was a coward and because the truth would introduce too many variables she couldn’t control, too many ways to lose her grasp on an increasingly dangerous situation. She could never be trustworthy. That was obvious. All she could do was try to keep Gideon out of the line of fire as long as possible, by whatever means necessary, and hope she cracked the Lyctor theory before they all ended up in drawers in the morgue. She didn’t trust _Dulcinea_ or Sextus or any of them. She would kill them if she had to. If whoever slew the Fifth tried to harm her cavalier, Harrow would feed them their own vertebrae. She would make a straitjacket of their ribs and squeeze until they were so much human pulp. 

“So. You don’t have to worry. Is all,” Gideon finished.

“I’m not worried,” Harrow said softly.

“Right! Course not. Why would you be?” Gideon didn't move, but Harrow couldn't shake the feeling that she had drawn away, somehow.

“Nav—”

“You _should_ be worried about what Palamades is going to say about your new haircut, though.”

Harrow furrowed her brow. “I highly doubt Sextus will say anything untoward.”

“Oh, not to you. He’ll say it to Camilla and it will be devastating.”

Harrow very nearly laughed. Instead she held her breath and the joke fell at their feet like a dead thing. When the danger passed, she sighed. “Just hurry up, Griddle. The others will be meeting soon.”

“Whatever you say, my glabrous governor.”

Gideon dropped the conversation like a sack of rotten snow leeks and went back to work. Harrow was glad to let it go. She tried to slow the beat of her heart and let herself be lulled by the rhythm of the blade against her scalp. There was no one to fight. No puzzle to solve. Just Gideon’s hands and the slow reveal of pale skin and her hair falling like drifting snow. At some point, Gideon started to hum. It sounded like a nursery rhyme, or a snatch of one, the same few bars over and over. Harrow didn’t recognize it. There had been no children to sing to in the Ninth House Harrow knew.

Eventually, Gideon stopped. Harrow blinked her eyes open. She didn’t remember closing them. Foolish. Their quarters were only marginally safer than the rest of Canaan, even with her wards.

“Okay. All done,” Gideon said, brushing her hands together. “You are now stupefyingly bald. I will not be held responsible for anyone going blind after beholding your nude head.”

Harrow ran her fingertips over the smooth dome of her head. She could almost see the shape of the bones beneath and found it oddly comforting. Gideon had done a good job; not even a nick.

“Might want to hop in the sonic though, unless you want to itch all night.” Gideon wiped the blade of the razor on a towel and folded it away. There was no tight anger to her packing up this time. She seemed settled in a way Harrow rarely saw her, a little like how she had looked after the Response chamber. When she looked up and found Harrow unmoving, her brows twitched together. “Didn’t you say hurry? Aren’t you worried the others will take all the good bits of the cremains or whatever?”

Harrow raised her eyebrows. “Do you expect me to disrobe in front of you?”

Gideon tipped her a wink. “Nothing I ain’t see before.” She turned to the door before she could see Harrow’s flush, raising one hand in a wave. “I’m ready when you are.”

“Gideon,” Harrow said. Gideon froze in the doorway like she’d stepped into a binding spell. “Thank you.”

Gideon turned toward her with a sharp jerk of her head. Her eyes flickered over Harrow’s face, searching, and Harrow glimpsed the naked surprise there before she dropped the sunglasses back onto her nose with a flick of her fingers.

“Don’t get squishy on me now, Nonagesimus. We’ve got murders to solve.”

Gideon closed the door behind her when she left. Harrow examined herself in the mirror one last time. She ran the bitten edges of her nails over her scalp, clean and bare, ready for new growth, and permitted herself a smile.

**Author's Note:**

> you ever have a a haircut so fraught that you have an existential crisis and rethink the nature of your relationship with your lifelong rival-turned-sworn sword or are you normal?
> 
> you can come say hi on tumblr [here!](https://corpsesoldier.tumblr.com)


End file.
